Last November Kristen Painter, my colleague at the paper, stood over my shoulder and taught me to use Twitter. Took about 10 minutes, and that was that. (Shameless plug: Follow me on Twitter for “Colorado Footnote” each work day at 12:45 p.m., a lunchtime serving of history, trivia, stuff I bet you didn’t know about our state. It doesn’t cost a thing.)

Meanwhile, the federal government is sinking a cool quarter-million bucks into finding out how weather wonks can get on Twitter and tell people about the weather, as well as how forecasters can collect news and information from tweets. That’s it.

So much for so little raises questions. To begin with, it’s a two-year study on a six-year-old technology with constraints beyond its 140-character limit. There’s plenty to cast doubt about the popularity of the platform in two or three years. We thought Myspace would never fade, and then it did. It used to be you were nobody if you didn’t talk Netflix at the cocktail party. Now you’re nobody if you do. Moreover, Twitter is a company valued at $8 billion that made less than $300 million last year, and given Facebook’s falling value in the public marketplace, you better bet ad intrusion is coming to your digital neighborhood, and then the cool kids will move out.

Forecast Colorado is your place for the latest breaking weather news for Denver and Colorado, featuring the latest forecasts, road conditions and closures — with an occasional detour into meterological science, trivia and oddities.